Charts have been used to graphically illustrate various activities or tasks over a time line. Various application programs often face difficulty, or introduce a need for extensive, specialized programming, when generating charts. Also, charts produced by various application programs, and even charts produced by a single application program, often have dissimilar formatting. These disadvantages are particularly applicable to the generation of Gantt charts.
The widespread use of the browser has prompted various programming languages and data formats to enable a display of data within the browser. In one example, the extensible mark-up language (XML) is a language used for representing data. An extensible style-sheet language (XSL) may be used to transform XML data or other types of data for purposes of displaying the data. However, each application program typically must process the data and convert the data into an XML description. Each application program requires its own XSL transformation or Simple Transformation. Because each application program is doing its own conversion, the forms and sizes of individual graphics that are shown are encoded in the conversion, precluding adaptation or exchange without programming requirements.
Thus, there is a need to address some of the deficiencies of conventional approaches to producing charts, such as Gantt charts. Further, there is a need to optionally produce Gantt charts that may reduce programming requirements across a variety of application programs. Further, there is a need to produce Gantt charts with similar formatting, including across application programs, regardless of task or activity format, while allowing for variations and customizations of the Gantt chart as desired.